There’s overwhelming evidence that the criminal-justice system is racist. Here’s the proof.

A couple years ago, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) gave a powerful speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Scott talked about how he had been repeatedly pulled over by police officers who seemed to be suspicious of a black man driving a nice car. He added that a black senior-level staffer had experienced the same thing and had even downgraded his car in the hope of avoiding the problem.Given that Scott otherwise has pretty conservative politics, there was little objection or protest from the right. No one rose up to say that he was lying about getting pulled over.

The thing is, most people of color have a similar story or know someone who does. Yet, there’s a deep skepticism on the right of any assertion that the criminal-justice system is racially biased. In early August, National Review editor and syndicated columnist Rich Lowry wrote a column disputing the notion that our system is racist. Andrew Sullivan wrote something similar in New York magazine. (Interestingly, both Lowry and Sullivan cite criminologist John Pfaff to support their positions. Pfaff has since protested on Twitter that both misinterpreted what he wrote.) And attempting to refute the notion that the system is racist has become a pretty regular beat for conservative crime pundit Heather Mac Donald.

Of particular concern to some on the right is the term “systemic racism,” often wrongly interpreted as an accusation that everyone in the system is racist. In fact, systemic racism means almost the opposite. It means that we have systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them. When you consider that much of the criminal-justice system was built, honed and firmly established during the Jim Crow era — an era almost everyone, conservatives included, will concede rife with racism — this is pretty intuitive. The modern criminal-justice system helped preserve racial order — it kept black people in their place. For much of the early 20th century, in some parts of the country, that was its primary function. That it might retain some of those proclivities today shouldn’t be all that surprising.

In any case, after more than a decade covering these issues, it’s pretty clear to me that the evidence of racial bias in our criminal-justice system isn’t just convincing — it’s overwhelming. But because there still seems to be some skepticism, I’ve attempted below to catalog the evidence. The list below isn’t remotely comprehensive. And if you know of other studies, please send them to me. I would like to make this post a repository for this issue.

I, of course, can’t vouch for the robustness or statistical integrity of all of these studies. I’m only summarizing them. But for the most part, I’ve tried to include either peer-reviewed studies or reviews of data that tend to speak for themselves and don’t require much statistical analysis. I will note that most (but not all) of these studies do factor in variables that address common claims such as that the criminal-justice system discriminates more by class than by race, or that racial discrepancies in sentencing or incarceration can be explained by the fact that black people commit more crimes. And I’ve also included a section for studies that do not find bias in various aspects of the criminal-justice system. There are far fewer of these, though I’m open to the possibility that I missed some.

Finally, none of this is to say that race is the only thing we need to worry about in the criminal-justice system. Certainly, lots of white people are wrongly accused, arrested and convicted. Lots of white people are treated unfairly, beaten, and unjustifiably shot and killed by police officers. White people too are harmed by policies such as mandatory minimums, asset forfeiture, and abuse of police, prosecutorial and judicial power.

There are problems here that are inextricable from race. And there are problems that aren’t directly related to race. But even the latter set of problems tend to be exacerbated when you factor race into the equation. On to the evidence.

Policing and profiling

I’ve had more than one retired police officer tell me that there is a running joke in law enforcement when it comes to racial profiling: It never happens . . . and it works. But the problem with trying to dismiss profiling concerns by noting that higher rates at which some minority groups commit certain crimes is that it overlooks the fact that huge percentages of black and Latino people have been pulled over, stopped on the street and generally harassed despite the fact that they have done nothing wrong. Stop and frisk data, for example, consistently show that about 3 percent of these encounters produce any evidence of a crime. So 97 percent-plus of these people are getting punished solely because they belong to a group that statistically commits some crimes at a higher rate. That ought to bother us.

In their book “Suspect Citizens,” Frank R. Baumgartner, Derek A. Epp and Kelsey Shoub reviewed 20 million traffic stops. In an interview with The Post, they shared what they found: “Blacks are almost twice as likely to be pulled over as whites — even though whites drive more on average,” “blacks are more likely to be searched following a stop,” and “just by getting in a car, a black driver has about twice the odds of being pulled over, and about four times the odds of being searched.” They found that blacks were more likely to be searched despite the fact they’re less likely to be found with contraband as a result of those searches.

A 2013 Justice Department study found that black and Latino drivers are more likely to be searched once they have been pulled over. About 2 percent of white motorists were searched, vs. 6 percent of black drivers and 7 percent of Latinos.

In 2015, the Charleston Post and Courier looked at incidents in which police stopped motorists but didn’t issue a citation. These are sometimes called “pretext stops,” because they suggest that the officer was profiling the motorist as a possible drug courier or suspected the motorist of other crimes. The paper found that after adjusting for population, blacks in nearly every part of the state were significantly more likely to be the subject of such stops.

A 2017 study of 4.5 million traffic stops by the 100 largest police departments in North Carolina found that blacks and Latinos were more likely to be searched than whites (5.4 percent, 4.1 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively), even though searches of white motorists were more likely than the others to turn up contraband (whites: 32 percent, blacks: 29 percent, Latinos: 19 percent).

According to the Justice Department, between 2012 and 2014, black people in Ferguson, Mo., accounted for 85 percent of vehicle stops, 90 percent of citations and 93 percent of arrests, despite comprising 67 percent of the population. Blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be searched after traffic stops, even though they proved to be 26 percent less likely to be in possession of illegal drugs or weapons. Between 2011 and 2013, blacks also received 95 percent of jaywalking tickets and 94 percent of tickets for “failure to comply.”The Justice Department also found that the racial discrepancy for speeding tickets increased dramatically when researchers looked at tickets based on only an officer’s word vs. tickets based on objective evidence, such as vs. radar. Black people facing similar low-level charges as white people were 68 percent less likely to see those charges dismissed in court. More than 90 percent of the arrest warrants stemming from failure to pay/failure to appearwere issued for black people.

These figures are similar to others throughout St. Louis County. For example, in the town of Florissant, 71 percent of the motorists pulled over by police in 2013 were black. Blacks make up 27 percent of the town at the time (they now make up 33 percent). Blacks were also twice as likely to be searched after a stop, even though white motorists were more likely to be found with contraband.

A studyof “investigatory” traffic stops — that is, stops that did not result in a citation — by police in Kansas City found that blacks were 2.7 times more likely to be pulled over in an investigatory stop, and five times more likely to be searched.

A study of stop and frisk incidents in Boston between 2007 and 2010 that did not result in a citation or arrest found that 63 percent of such stops were of black people. Blacks made up 24 percent of the city’s population. Incredibly, 97.5 percent of these encounters resulted in no arrest or seizure of contraband.

A 2015 statistical analysis of police shootings from 2011 to 2014 found that the racial disparity in police shootings of black people could not be explained by higher crime rates in majority-black communities.

A 2018 Post investigation found that murders of white people are more likely to be solved than murders of black people. There’s also a strong correlation between areas that are black-majority and low-income and the areas with the lowest clearance rate for homicides.

Similarly, a study published in June reviewed every reported homicide between 1976 and 2009 and found that “homicides with white victims are significantly more likely to be ‘cleared’ by the arrest of a suspect than are homicides with minority victims.”

Another ACLU study, this time on the use of stop-and-frisk in Milwaukee between 2010 and 2017, found that in nearly half of the more than 700,000 such stops, the police failed to demonstrate reasonable suspicion as required by the Constitution. The study found that between pedestrian stops and traffic stops, black people were six times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, and that less than 1 percent of those searches turned up any contraband. Here again, while black and Latino drivers were more likely to be searched, they were 20 percent less likely to be in possession of any contraband.

Going back to 2002, data show that when New York City was implementing its stop-and-frisk policy, white people generally made up only about 10 percent of such stops, despite making up about 45 percent of the city. Black and Latino people made up more than 80 percent of the stops, despite making up just over half the city population. Consistently, between 85 and 90 percent of such stops produced no arrest, citation or evidence of criminal activity. Fewer than 1 percent of stops produced a gun, the alleged reason for the policy.

Between 2012 and 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department received more than 1,350 citizen complaints of racial profiling. The department didn’t uphold a single complaint.

A 2016 report found that between 2011 and 2015, black drivers in Nashville’s Davidson County were pulled over at a rate of 1,122 stops per 1,000 drivers — so on average, more than once per black driver. Black drivers were also searched at twice the rate of white drivers, though — as in other jurisdictions — searches of white drivers were more likely to turn up contraband.

A 2017 study of interactions between officers and citizens taken from footage captured by police officer body cameras found that “officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop.”

An NAACP survey of citizen complaints against police officers in North Charleston, S.C., between 2006 and 2016 found that complaints by white citizens were about two-thirds more likely to be sustained than complaints filed by black citizens. When the complainant alleged excessive force, white complaints were sustained seven times more often than black complaints.

A 2015 study found that though black women are just 6 percent of the female population of San Francisco, they account for 45.5 percent of female arrests.

Misdemeanors, petty crimes and driver’s license suspensions

A national study of misdemeanor arrests published this year in the Boston University Law Review found that the “black arrest rate is at least twice as high as the white arrest rate for disorderly conduct, drug possession, simple assault, theft, vagrancy, and vandalism. The black arrest rate for prostitution is almost five times higher than the white arrest rate, and the black arrest rate for gambling is almost ten times higher.”

According to a Justice Department study released in 2013, throughout the United States, black drivers are about 30 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Black drivers are also more likely to be pulled over for alleged mechanical or equipment problems with their automobiles, or for record checks. White people are actually more likely to get pulled over for noticeable traffic violations such as speeding.Black drivers are more likely to not be told why they were pulled over.

In 2016, the ACLU of Florida released a report that found that black drivers in that state were twice as likely to be pulled over for seat-belt violations as white drivers.

A 2017 Chicago Tribune investigation found that as the city ramped up its ticketing of bicyclists, black neighborhoods received more than twice as many citations as white and Latino neighborhoods. A year later, black neighborhoods were getting three times more bicycle tickets than white neighborhoods.

A ProPublica and Florida Times-Union report published last year showed that black residents of Jacksonville are three times more likely to receive a citation for a pedestrian violation than white residents. The report found no correlation between aggressive enforcement of jaywalking laws and where pedestrians were most likely to be struck by cars and killed. Instead, they found that most citations were issued in majority-black neighborhoods. Residents of the three poorest zip codes in the city, for example, were about six times more likely to get pedestrian citation tickets.

A study of traffic citations issued in the Cleveland area in 2009 found that while blacks represented 38 percent of the driving population, they received 59 percent of police citations. Interestingly, when it comes to readily observable violations such as red-light running or speeding, the numbers were more even — whites actually received a greater percentage of speeding tickets. Black motorists, however, were far more likely to be pulled over and cited for violations that are either much less obvious (they received 61 percent of seat-belt violations) or that aren’t readily observable at all (they received 79 percent of the citations for driving on a suspended license).

A 2015 ACLU study of four cities in New Jersey found that black people were 2.6 to 9.6 times more likely to be arrested than white people for low-level offenses.

The drug war

Black people are consistently arrested, charged and convicted of drug crimes including possession, distribution and conspiracy at far higher rates than white people. This, despite research showing that both races use and sell drugs at about the same rate.

As of May, data from New York City showed that black people are arrested for marijuana at eight times the rate of white people. In Manhattan, it’s 15 times as much. Black neighborhoods produce far more arrests than white neighborhoods, despite data showing a similar rate at which residents complain about marijuana use.

White people have made up about 45 percent of New York residents (about 33 percent if you count only non-Hispanic whites) over the past two decades but have made up fewer than 15 percent of the city’s marijuana arrests.

A 2014 ACLU survey of SWAT teams across the country found that “dynamic entry” and paramilitary police tactics are disproportionately used against black and Latino people. Most of these raids were on people suspected of low-level drug crimes.

When The Post in 2014 reviewed 400 recent instances of questionable asset forfeiture, a majority of the motorists who had property confiscated by the police were nonwhite.

A 2013 study by the ACLU found that black people were 3.73 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession. And 88 percent of marijuana arrests are for possession. (The disparity is actually lowest in the West and South, and highest in the Northeast and Midwest.) The study found that the racial disparities were also getting larger, not smaller.

In contrast to the assertion that blacks are more likely to be arrested because they’re more likely to use drugs in public, a 2002 study of narcotics search warrants in the San Diego area — that is, warrants to search for drugs in private homes — found that black and Hispanic residents were “significantly over-represented as targets of narcotics search warrants,” even after adjusting for usage rates. The study also found that “searches of White suspects were more successful in recovering the targeted drug than were searches of either Black or Hispanic suspects.”

According to figures from the National Registry of Exonerations (NER) black people are about five times more likely to go to prison for drug possession than white people. According to exoneration data, black people are also 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes.

When Harris County, Tex., saw a flaw in how drug testing was conducted at its crime lab, officials went back and exonerated dozens of people who had been wrongly convicted for possession — most pleaded guilty, despite their innocence. This is because prosecutors often promise harsher sentences or more charges for defendants who take a case to trial. Black people comprise 20 percent of the Harris County population but made up 62 percent of the wrongful drug convictions.

Not included in these wrongful conviction figures are cases in which police and narcotics task forces conducted mass arrests of entire black or Latino neighborhoods or towns. Hundreds of people were persuaded to plead guilty to drug charges. By the NER’s estimate, there have been more than 1,800 such “group exonerations” in 15 cities since 1989. Almost all those exonerated were black or Latino.

Black people comprise about 12.5 percent of drug users but 29 percent of arrests for drug crimes and 33 percent of those incarcerated.

A 2017 report by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune of Florida’s drug convictions found that while blacks made up 17 percent of the state’s population, they made up 46 percent of felony drug convictions since 2004. Blacks were also three times as likely to get hit with — and made up two-thirds of — the sentencing enhancements for committing drug crimes near a school zone, church, park or public housing. In all, when blacks and whites committed similar drug crimes, blacks on average received a sentence that was two-thirds longer. In some parts of the state, it was two or three times longer.

An analysis of drug war data by the Vera Institute of Justice published this year found that “the risk of incarceration in the federal system for someone who uses drugs monthly and is black is more than seven times that of his or her white counterpart.”

A 2017 report of civil asset forfeiture seizures in Chicago showed that the vast majority of such actions were in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. The average value of the property seized was $4,553; the median value was $1,049.

Juries and jury selection

Though the Supreme Court made it illegal for prosecutors to exclude prospective jurors because of race in the 1986 caseBatson v. Kentucky, that ruling has largely gone unenforced. The New Yorker reported in 2015 that in the approximately 30 years since the ruling, courts have accepted the flimsiest excuses for striking black jurors and that prosecutors have in turn trained subordinates how to strike black jurors without a judicial rebuke. A 2010 report by the Equal Justice Initiative documented cases in which courts upheld prosecutors’ dismissal of jurors because of allegedly race-neutral factors such as affiliation with a historically black college, a son in an interracial marriage, living in a black-majority neighborhood or that a juror “shucked and jived.”

There are no comprehensive national data on the rate at which prosecutors strike black jurors, but there have been quite a few regional studies.

A study of criminal cases from 1983 and 1993 found that prosecutors in Philadelphia removed 52 percent of potential black jurors vs. only 23 percent of nonblack jurors.

Between 2003 and 2012, prosecutors in Caddo Parish, La. — one of the most aggressive death penalty counties in the country — struck 46 percent of prospective black jurors with preemptory challenges, vs. 15 percent of nonblacks.

A 2011 study from Michigan State University College of Law found that between 1990 and 2010, state prosecutors struck about 53 percent of black people eligible for juries in criminal cases, vs. about 26 percent of white people. The study’s authors concluded that the chance of this occurring in a race-neutral process was less than 1 in 10 trillion. Even after adjusting for excuses given by prosecutors that tend to correlate with race, the 2-to-1 discrepancy remained. The state legislature had previously passed a law stating that death penalty defendants who could demonstrate racial bias in jury selection could have their sentences changed to life without parole. The legislature later repealed that law.

Most recently, American Public Media’s “In the Dark” podcast did painstaking research on the 26-year career of Mississippi District Attorney Doug Evans and found that over the course of his career, Evans’s office struck 50 percent of prospective black jurors, vs. just 11 percent of whites.

In the 32 years since Batson, the U.S Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit — which includes Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana — has upheld a Batson challenge only twice. That is out of hundreds of challenges.

A survey of seven death penalty cases in Columbus, Ga., going back to the 1970s found that prosecutors struck 41 of 44prospective black jurors. Six of the seven trials featured all-white juries.

In a 2010 study, “mock jurors” were given the same evidence from a fictional robbery case but then shown alternate security camera footage depicting either a light-skinned or dark-skinned suspect. Jurors were more likely to evaluate ambiguous, race-neutral evidence against the dark-skinned suspect as incriminating and more likely to find the dark-skinned suspect guilty.

The death penalty

Prosecutors on aggregate don’t seem to seek the death penalty more for black people than white people, though there are definitely some gaping disparities in a few states and in some counties. Instead, the real racial bias when it comes to the death penalty pertains to the race of the victim. Killers of black people rarely get death sentences. White killers of black people get death sentences even less frequently. And far and away, the type of murder most likely to bring a death sentence is a black man who kills a white woman.

A 2012 study of Harris County, Tex., cases found that people who killed white victims were 2.5 times more likely to be sentenced to the death penalty than other killers.

In Delaware, according to a 2012 study, “black defendants who kill white victims are seven times as likely to receive the death penalty as are black defendants who kill black victims. … Moreover, black defendants who kill white victims are more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as are white defendants who kill white victims.”

A study of death penalty rates of black perpetrators/white victims vs. white perpetrators/black victims through 1999showed similar discrepancies. Interestingly, the study found that blacks are underrepresented on death row in proportion to the proportion of murders they commit. But this is largely because most black murderers kill other black people, and prosecutors are far less likely to seek the death penalty when the victim is black.

A study of North Carolina murder cases from 1980 through 2007 found that murderers who kill white people are three times more likely to get the death penalty than murderers who kill black people.

A 2000 study commissioned by then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) found that the state had, as of that time, never executed a white person for killing a black person.

A 2004 study of Illinois, Georgia, Maryland and Florida estimated that “one quarter to one third of death sentenced defendants with white victims would have avoided the death penalty if their victims had been black.”

According to a 2002 study commissioned by then-Gov. Frank O’Bannon (D), Indiana had executed only one person for killing a nonwhite victim, and though 47 percent of homicides in the state involved nonwhite victims, just 16 percent of the state’s death sentences did.

A 2014 study looking at 33 years of data found that after adjusting for variables such as the number of victims and brutality of the crimes, jurors in Washington state were 4.5 times more likely to impose the death penalty on black defendants accused of aggravated murder than on white ones.

Black people are also more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder when the victim was white. Only about 15 percent of people killed by black people were white, but 31 percent of black exonorees were wrongly convicted of killing white people. More generally, black people convicted of murder are 50 percent more likely to be innocent than white people convicted of murder.

Innocent black people are also 3.5 times more likely than white people to be wrongly convicted of sexual assault and 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes. (And remember, data on wrongful convictions is limited in that it can only consider the wrongful convictions we know about.)

A 2000 study of federal cases found that federal prosecutors were about 50 percentmore likely to offer a plea bargain to white murder suspects than black suspects that allowed them to avoid the death penalty.

In Houston County, Ala., prosecutors struck 80 percent of black people from juries in death penalty cases.

In Tennessee, blacks make up 17 percent of the population but 44 percent of death row. In the last 10 years, eight of the nine death sentences handed down in the state were to black defendants.

A 2006 Stanford report found that when a black person was accused of killing a white person, defendants with darker skin and more “stereotypically black” features were twice as likely to receive a death sentence. When the victim was black, there was almost no difference.

A 2016 study found that in Louisiana, killers of white victims were 14 times more likely to be executed than killers of black victims. Black men who killed white women were 30 times more likely to get the death penalty than black men who killed black men. Those convicted of killing white people were also less likely to have their sentences overturned on appeal, and Louisiana hasn’t executed a white person for killing a black person since 1752.

Prosecutors, discretion and plea bargaining

Depending on which study you look at, somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of criminal cases are resolved with a plea bargain before ever getting to trial. While most legal observers agree that plea bargaining is widely abused and does little to serve the interests of justice, most also believe believe that if every defendant were to insist on a trial, the system would come grinding to a halt. The bias here comes in when we look at who gets plea bargains, what kinds of deals they’re offered and how many, though innocent, feel pressured to accept.

A 2015 study by the Women Donors Network found that in three-fifths of the states where prosecutors are elected, there isn’t a single black prosecutor. Overall, the study found that in the United States, 95 percent of elected prosecutors are white, and nearly 80 percent are white men. In ninedeath penalty states (Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington and Wyoming), all of the elected district attorneys were white in 2015.

A 2017 study of about 48,000criminal cases in Wisconsin showed that white defendants were 25 percent more likely than black defendants to have their most serious charge dismissed in a plea bargain. Among defendants facing misdemeanor charges that could carry a sentence of incarceration, whites were 75 percent more likely to have those charges dropped, dismissed or reduced to a charge that did not include such a punishment.

A 2014 study of Manhattan criminal cases found that black defendants were 19 percent more likely to be offered plea deals that included jail time.

A 2011 summary of the research on race and plea bargaining published by the Bureau of Justice Assistance concluded that “the majority of research on race and sentencing outcomes shows that blacks are less likely than whites to receive reduced pleas,” that “studies that assess the effects of race find that blacks are less likely to receive a reduced charge compared with whites,” and that “studies have generally found a relationship between race and whether or not a defendant receives a reduced charge.”

A 2016 review of nearly 474,000 criminal cases in Hampton Roads, Va., found that whites were more likely to get plea deals that resulted in no jail time for drug offenses. While facing charges of drug distribution, 48 percent of whites received plea bargains with no jail time, vs. 22 percent of blacks. Among those with prior criminal records who pleaded guilty to robbery, 36 percent of whites got no jail time, vs. 8 percent of blacks.

A 2013 study found that after adjusting for numerous other variables, federal prosecutors were almost twice as likely to bring charges carrying mandatory minimums against black defendants as against white defendants accused of similar crimes.

A 2008 analysis found that black defendants with multiple prior convictions are 28 percent more likely to be charged as “habitual offenders” than white defendants with similar criminal records. The authors conclude that “assessments of dangerousness and culpability are linked to race and ethnicity, even after offense seriousness and prior record are controlled.”

Judges and sentencing

While white, non-Hispanics make up about 61 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise 83 percent of state trial court judges and 80 percent of state appellate court judges.

A survey of data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission last year found that when black men and white men commit the same crime, black men on average receive a sentence almost 20 percent longer. The research controlled for variables such as age and prior criminal history.

When it comes to federal gun crimes, black people are more likely to be arrested, more likely to get longer sentences for similar crimes and more likely to get sentencing “enhancements,” according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

A New Jersey study found that 96 percent of defendants subject to an enhanced sentencing under “drug-free school zone” laws were black or Latino.

A study published last May found that when a white person and a black person are convicted of similar crimes, Republican-appointed judges sentence the black person to three months longer in prison.

A 2007 Harvard study found sentencing discrepancies among black people, depending on the darkness of their skin. The study looked at 67,000 first-time felons in Georgia from 1995 to 2002. The average sentence for white men was 2,689 days. The average for black men was 378 days longer. But light-skinned blacks received sentences of about three and a half months longer than whites. Medium-skinned blacks received a sentence of about a year longer. Dark-skinned blacks received sentences of a year and a half longer.

A 2015 study in the Journal of Legal Studies found that black federal judges are about 10 percentage points more likely to be reversed on appeal than white federal judges. The study adjusted for variables like who appointed the judges, judicial circuits and demographic data.

A 2015 study of first-time felons found that while black men overall received sentences of 270 days longer than white men for similar crimes, the discrepancy between whites and dark-skinned blacks was 400 days.

School suspensions and the school-to-prison pipeline

A 2011 study of school discipline in Texas found that after isolating race by adjusting for 83 other variables, a black student had a 31 percent greater chance of being disciplined than an identical white or Hispanic student.

A study of suspensions in Chicago schools from 2013 to 2014 found that black male students were more than five times more likely to be suspended than white and Asian male students. Black female students were seven times more likely than white and Asian female students.After adjusting for academic level and social disadvantages, black males were still five times more likely to be suspended, while the disparity for black females grew to 13 times more likely.

A Brown Center on Education Policy study released last year found that suspension rates of black students begin to escalate during middle school, and that the racial disparity in suspensions increases dramatically once black students comprise 16 percent or more of a school’s student population.

Prison, incarceration and solitary confinement

Black people are of course overrepresented in the prison population. And, as noted in one particular study below, they’re overrepresented even after you account for variables such as the crime rate among blacks.

Data from the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission released in 2016 found that black people in the state are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than white people. Hispanic people were about five times more likely.

A 2016 Yale University study of solitary confinement in 48 jurisdictions across 45 statesfound that black prisoners were more likely to be held in isolation than white prisoners. The discrepancy was even greater among women — black women made up 24 percent of the female prison population but 41 percent of those who had been held in isolation(that figure came from 40 jurisdictions.) A report published this year found that in Texas, black prisoners are much more likely to be sent to solitary confinement, even as Texas prisons are phasing out the practice.

In surveying the research on the topic, the Sentencing Project estimates that 61 to 80 percent of black overrepresentation in prisons can be explained by higher crime rates in the black population. (Of course, those higher crime rates themselves could be due in part to racial bias.) The rest is probably because of racial bias.

Bail, pretrial detention, commutations and pardons, gangs and other issues

According to a 2014 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, black and Latino defendants in New York City were more likely to be detained before trial for comparable crimes. They were also more likely to have charges dismissed. The study didn’t look at this, but that may have been because they were more likely to be wrongly arrested in the first place. The study found that race played a role at nearly every step in the process, from arrest to detention to setting bail to sentencing.

A 2011 study of bail in five large U.S. counties found that blacks received $7,000 higher bail than whites for violent crimes, $13,000 higher for drug crimes and $10,000 higher for crimes related to public order. These disparities were calculated after adjusting for the seriousness of the crime, criminal history and other variables.

In 2014, the Urban Institute looked at probation offices in four locations across the country: New York City; Multnomah County, Ore.; Dallas County, Tex.; and Iowa’s Sixth Judicial District. After adjusting for criminal history, seriousness of the crime and other factors, the study found that black people were 18 to 39 percent more likely than white people to have their probation revoked.

A 2017 study of more than 10,000 cases handled by a public defender’s office in San Francisco found that black and Latino defendants were more likely to be incarcerated while awaiting trial, had to wait longer for their trials to begin, were less likely to see their charges reduced and were more likely to see new misdemeanor charges added.

An ACLU report issued this year found that in Miami, black people faced “2.2 times greater rates of arrest, 2.3 times greater rates of pretrial detention, 2.5 times greater rates of conviction, and 2.5 times greater rates of incarceration.” Hispanics were “subject to four times greater rates of arrest, 4.5 times greater rates of pretrial detention, 5.5 times greater rates of conviction, and six times greater rates of incarceration.”

A 2011 investigation of presidential pardons by ProPublica found that white federal prisoners are almost four times as likely to receive a pardon than minority federal prisoners. There’s also some evidence of a racial disparity when it comes to presidential commutations.

About 16 percent of sexual assaults of white women are committed by black men, but half of the exonerations for sexual assault involve cases in which an eyewitness wrongly identified a black man for the rape of a white woman.

A study of the pardons granted in Mississippi during former governor Haley Barbour’s tenure found that although blacks make up almost two-thirds of the state’s prison population, they make up fewer than a third of the people to whom Barbour granted clemency. (It is worth noting that this isn’t about the severity of the crime — Barbour pardoned at least eight men who killed their wives or girlfriends.)

A 2016 New York Times report of thousands of parole hearings found that fewer than 1 in 6 black or Latino men was released after his first parole hearing. Among white men, it was 1 in 4.

A 2016 study from a consortium of civil rights groups found wide racial disparities in the suspension of driver’s licenses of California residents. Some black and Latino communities had suspension rates five times the state average.

A 2016 report from the Black Alliance for Just Immigration found that black immigrants were significantly more likely to be deported than immigrants of other races.

Though more than half the people on Mississippi’s gang registry are white, every person prosecuted under the state’s anti-gang law from 2010 to 2017 has been black.

The dissent — contrarian studies on race and the criminal-justice system

A longitudinal study released in January by the People’s Policy Project suggests that class is a more prominent driver of incarceration than race.

A 2015 study of parolees found that “violation rates are consistently higher for African American parolees, a result not consistent with a parole board bias against African Americans.” A similar study of Pennsylvania parolees from 1999 to 2003 found high recidivism rates among blacks, again suggesting that parole boards were not discriminating based on race. (Neither study accounted for the possibility of racial bias among parole officers — that officers might be more inclined to find violations against black parolees than against white ones.)

A 2017 study of school suspensions at the five largest school districts in Wisconsin found that the districts were implementing suspensions in a way that was counterproductive to a positive learning environment but that there was little evidence that the suspensions were driven by racial bias.

A 2015 analysis of prison data by the Marshall Project found that though there are still wide racial disparities when it comes to mass incarceration, the black-white divide in prison populations is narrowing, particularly among women. Unfortunately, the gap appears to be widening among juveniles.

A 2006 study of police stops in Oakland measured stops during the day with those made at night, on the theory that if police officers were profiling, there should be more stops of black and Latino motorists during daytime hours, when race would be more discernible. The study found no significant discrepancy.

In 2016, the New York Times reported a working paper (i.e., not peer-reviewed) by Harvard’s Roland G. Fryer Jr. found that though there was evidence of racial bias in how and when police generally use force, there was no evidence of bias when it came to police shootings. Fryer later criticized the way his study had been reported, and critics (including me) pointed out several limitations to his study.

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Radley BalkoRadley Balko blogs and reports on criminal justice, the drug war and civil liberties for The Washington Post. Previously, he was an investigative reporter for the Huffington Post and a writer and editor for Reason magazine. His most recent book is "The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: A True Story of Injustice in the American South." Follow